Lukas Kambic, a biology major at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, sought to use his own experience to counter the anecdotes others voiced that night. ‘My mom ate organic food exclusively and did yoga all the time, and she died of a brain aneurysm,’ Mr. Kambic said. ‘According to the logic of people here, she was killed by organic food and yoga.’

Suddenly Aldridge was flying backward, tumbling across the deck toward the back of the boat, which was wide open, just a flat, slick ramp leading straight into the black ocean a few inches below. Aldridge grabbed for the side of the boat as it went past, his fingertips missing it by inches. The water hit him like a slap. He went under, took in a mouthful of Atlantic Ocean and then surfaced, sputtering. He yelled as loud as he could, hoping to wake Sosinski, who was asleep on a bunk below the front deck. But the diesel engine was too loud, and the Anna Mary, on autopilot, moving due south at six and a half knots, was already out of reach, its navigation lights receding into the night. Aldridge shouted once more, panic rising in his throat, and then silence descended. He was alone in the darkness.

The state of mainstream media, desperate for a few advertising dollars and selling their credibility and principles in return.

Of course, you’ve seen this movie before, in your spam-mail folder. And yet this isn’t some obscure publication written mostly by keyboard slaves over there in some remote country or a ‘news-blog’ sweatshop gearing up to sell itself to a bigger one.

No, this is nothing but household brands: CNN (the once-daring company that changed cable forever) and Fortune (founded by Henry Luce in 1930, four months after the Wall Street Crash of 1929). This is the establishment. The “mainstream” media that is constantly fretting about its loss of stature, impact and financial viability.

The catastrophe of death and anarchy that failed drug suppression has brought to Mexico and to other narco-states makes the west’s obsessive war on terror seem like a footling sideshow. The road out of this darkness is now being charted not in the old world but in the new, whose heroic legislators deserve to be awarded a Nobel peace prize.

If for each question I wrote each of the possible alternatives on bananas, and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, and by picking the right bananas, they’d just pick bananas at random. But the Brits did even worse.

You don’t believe it? Here’s what one of the judges on these tribunals says about his work. “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.”